Generally, in a dental clinic or the like, dental treatment is performed through an impression taking process of taking a plaster cast of patient's teeth. This impression taking process, however, may accompany various problems such as consumption of an impression material, cross-infection, chance of breakage of the fabricated cast, problems in conservation, and so forth.
Conventionally, as a way to investigate the oral health of a patient, there has been widely employed a method of inserting a film in a sheet form into the oral cavity of the patent, fixing the film near an affected area by using the patient's hand or tongue, projecting radioactive rays to the affected area within the oral cavity, and examining the film with an image of the affected area formed thereon.
In such a method, however, since the affected area is measured two-dimensionally from a radiograph through a manual operation, or since this method is CT (Computer Tomography)-dependent, there is a likelihood that an error may occur when measuring a three-dimensional structure on the two-dimensional plane. Further, various problems may also be caused in the clinical aspect because this method exposes the patient to a large quantity of radioactive rays and imposes financial burden on the patient as well as involving a complicated process on the implementation stage.
Meanwhile, in order to form a prosthetic device for restoring a patient's impaired tooth, a plaster cast of the impaired tooth is first fabricated through an impression taking process in the dental clinic, and, then, production of a prosthetic device corresponding to the plaster cast is requested to a dental technician.
According to the conventional prosthetic device production process, however, since treatment data is indirectly acquired from the plaster cast of the tooth to diagnose and measure a current state of the tooth of the patient, it takes great time and effort.
In this regard, Korean Patent Publication No. 10-2009-007853 (entitled “Three-dimensional measure system for the dental prosthesis”) describes a measure system for dental prosthesis configured to scan an oral cavity model. The measure system includes an image capturing unit equipped with a camera configured to capture a laser image projected on a measurement target object by using a laser beam, which is irradiated from a laser beam generator, as a light source; an illumination unit provided at one side of the image capturing unit and configured to illuminate toward an irradiation direction of the light source; a linear conveyor unit provided at one side of the illumination unit and configured to move the image capturing unit straightly in one direction by being driven by an electric driving source; a rotary conveyor unit interlocked with the linear conveyor unit and configured to rotate the image capturing unit by being driven to rotate by the electric driving source; and a worktable provided at the rotary conveyor unit in a detachable manner and configured to be moved as one body with the rotary conveyor unit while carrying the measurement target object fixe thereon.